The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

“Roger.” Michael sat back, happy to wait for Terranova to tell him what to do. A bit more than ten minutes later, he had his answer.

“Command, Prime.”

“Go ahead, Prime.”

“Terranova advises four Fed heavy cruisers have been tasked to assist, designated Task Unit 822.4.1, Captain Xiong, Seigneur, commanding. Dropping in five minutes.”

That was damn quick, Michael thought.

“Names?” he asked, hoping that one might be Damishqui.

“Seigneur, Select, Ulugh Beg, and Rebuke.”

Damn, he thought. No Damishqui meant no Anna. Pity. “Command, roger. Maneuver to take station 100 kilometers behind and between the two Hammers and match vector. Confirm Hammer ship identities.”

“The McMullins and the Providence Sound.”

Michael’s eyebrows shot up. The McMullins was an old Triumph class ship, but the Providence Sound was a brand-new City class heavy cruiser. Fleet intelligence would be pleased.

The minutes dragged past. Michael was content to sit and watch the slowly tumbling remnants of the two Hammer ships, their forward sections the only clue that they once had been fully operational warships.

“Sir, positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 45 Up 0. Four vessels. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector nominal for Terra-nova outbound approach.”

“Roger.” Damn, that boy was good. He was reading the grav arrays well ahead of Prime. Must remember to write him up, Michael thought.

“Sir. Targets dropping. Confirm drop datum at Red 44 Up 1 at 9,000 kilometers.”

“Roger that.”

“Well, well, well,” Michael murmured. The new arrivals had more faith in their navigation AIs than Michael did in Adamant’s; 9,000 kilometers was close.

In a brief blaze of ultraviolet, the four Fed ships dropped into normalspace, immediately turning to close in on Adamant and her two shattered charges.

“Adamant, Seigneur.” Must be Captain Xiong, Michael thought as the command holovid switched to show a Fed captain, her face betraying the same confused mix of fatigue and uncertainty he had seen on Lenski’s right after the Hammer attack.

“Adamant.”

“I’m Captain Xiong. Effective immediately you’re assigned to Task Unit 822.4.1 under my command.”

“Roger that, sir.” No surprises there.

“We’re closing in to send boarding parties across. Then we’ll start recovering the Hammer lifepods. Do you need any immediate assistance?’

“None, thank you, sir. My navigation AI is suspect, which is why we were here in the first place, but apart from that all my systems are nominal.”

“Roger. Stand by. I’ll get back to you when we’ve secured the ships. Oh, and by the way, well done. Xiong out.”

Bienefelt leaned across. “I think she likes you, sir,” she whispered, her voice loaded with all the breathy intensity of a teenager sharing the secrets of young love.

Michael leaned over. “Piss off, Matti,” he whispered back.

Bienefelt laughed. “I’m going walkabout, sir. See if anything’s shifted.”

“Fine. Take your guys with you. I don’t want them sitting around. I’ll patch Adamant into the task group’s BattleNet. You can keep an eye on what’s happening.”

“Sir.”

After Bienefelt left Michael alone in the combat information center, he sat back. With Xiong and her ships there, there was not a lot for him to do. He patched his neuronics into the helmet-mounted holocam of the marine major leading the boarding party heading for the Providence Sound. There were some privileges to being the captain of a light cruiser, and he meant to make the most of them. The only Hammer ship he had seen the inside of had been some crappy mership conversion, and then only when he was scheduled to have the shit kicked out of him. He was keen to see what the real thing looked like.

Xiong was wasting no time getting across to what was left of the Hammer ships, and the marines certainly looked in no mood to hang around. When the first assault lander got close to the Providence Sound, doors port and starboard banged open to release a stream of black-suited marines, the boarding party cutting across the gap with an easy grace. They did not bother knocking. In seconds, a single roll of shaped-charge explosive was fast-glued to an air lock frame and fired, cutting a neat hole deep into the Providence Sound’s hull. Two marines dropped into the hole to repeat the process on the inner air lock door, and barely thirty seconds after they deployed, the marines were pouring into the ship.

What Michael saw shocked him. With her artgrav thrown off-line, the inside of the Providence Sound was a shambles. The marines’ powerful torches picked out a mess of debris and equipment floating in a surreal slow-motion dance backlit by the ship’s emergency lighting. The shock wave from the loss of the aft auxiliary fusion plants had ripped equipment, pipework, and cables indiscriminately off their mounts but here and there had left little islands of normality: A workstation with a clipboard still stuck to the bulkhead; a damage- control locker open, its contents still neatly arranged; a holovid still flashing the order to abandon ship in pulsating red and yellow.

Everywhere he could see the bodies of dead spacers, space suits slashed and ripped, visors shattered, red- black scars of blood frozen around hastily applied bright yellow emergency suit patches, evidence of desperate attempts to save the un-savable. Michael watched, sickened. They might be Hammers, but they were ordinary spacers, too.

Something struck him as he watched. Xiong’s marines weren’t acting like most other boarding parties: spreading out, poking around, seeing if there were any survivors, that sort of thing. They were not hanging around. The slightest problem with a door or hatch, and it was blown open. They did the same with equipment blocking a passageway. Bang. Gone. Move on.

No, these marines were on a mission, and belatedly, as they pushed their way down into the center of the ship before turning to go forward, Michael realized what they were after. When they came to the armored door that protected the forward missile magazines, he knew his guess had been right. These men were after Eaglehawk missiles fitted with antimatter warheads.

The magazine door was the first door the marines did not blow off. A plasma cutter was brought to bear, and a hole big enough to admit a space-suited marine was cut with infinite care. Once they got inside, the doors were opened easily by the emergency override. The marines were in.

Michael had seen plenty of missile magazines. This one looked no different from any other, but it still took his breath away. The magazine was filled with the dull black shapes of Eaglehawk missiles racked from deck to deckhead in hydraulically powered cradles. There were hundreds of the damn things in this section of the magazine alone. Above the racks were the hydraulic rams that moved missiles into the salvo dispenser that sat behind sliding blast doors. Everywhere shock-damaged pipes spawned tiny globules of hydraulic fluid. Little rainbow spheres shimmered, iridescent in the light from the marines’ torches as they floated across the magazine.

The major whose holocam Michael was patched into did not waste any time looking around. Once through the door, he was up into the missile racks, looking carefully at the closest missile’s warhead. It did not take long for him to find what he was looking for, a small RFID-radio frequency identity-tag fixed to the nose of the missile with a thin plastic tie. He waved up one of his team, who pulled out what looked like a small handgun and put it to the tag. There was a long pause as the two huddled over the missile. Michael prayed that they knew what they were doing. The thought that they might be only centimeters from an antimatter warhead, probably shock damaged, possibly unstable, and potentially liable to explode, taking everything with it-Adamant included- made his stomach flip. Thank God he had aborted the missile strike. If he had not. . Well, suffice it to say, he and his crew would not be watching Xiong’s marines stealing Hammer missiles.

Finally, they were done. A thumb went up. Michael’s privileges as captain did not extend to being able to patch in to the major’s voice circuit, but he did not need to. The man’s body language spoke volumes.